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The author has confused "race" with "education". I am a white American who lived in the South Pacific. One of the things I noticed is that the term "Expat" was

The author has confused "race" with "education". I am a white American who lived in the South Pacific. One of the things I noticed is that the term "Expat" was used to refer to a qualified worker who goes abroad to work for an international company for a specified amount of time. My neighbor and friend was an "Expat" Fijian working on a two year bank rotation. "Immigrant" was used mostly for migrant workers or workers that had an undetermined timeframe.

dalke 12y ago
That is the simplest definition of ex-pat, but there are other types of ex-pats. Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway are two of the most famous of the American expat community in inter-war Europe. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202317 I listed a couple examples of modern ex-pat artists. As perhaps an extreme counter-example, take a look at Wikipedia's list of American expats in Cuba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_expatriates_in_Cuba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_expatriates_i... . It includes Assata Shakur, who "escaped from prison in 1979 and has been living in Cuba, in political asylum, since 1984". She did not go there to work for an international company, and she is there for an indefinite amount of time.
- gamechangr 12y ago
  True - There are always "extreme counter-examples" to every situation and I enjoy people who like to be contrarians for the purpose of pointing out there are other "less simple" or more complicated definitions. It does appear that your post didn't really address my main point, which was that "Education" separates the immigrant from the expat.
  - dalke 12y ago
    The article said: > Top African professionals going to work in Europe are not considered expats. They are immigrants. Period. “I work for multinational organisations both in the private and public sectors. And being black or coloured doesn’t gain me the term “expat”. I’m a highly qualified immigrant, as they call me, to be politically correct,” says an African migrant worker. For your statement to be meaningful, what more education does this highly qualified African need to be considered an expat? Do people go around asking for someone's educational level before assigning them the label "expat" or "immigrant"? It's much easier to believe that the main distinction is based on the more overt indicators of 'social class, country of origin and economic status', than education level. For example, the thousands of Iraqi doctors, engineers, and other PhD educated people, who fled Iraq and moved to the US or European countries, are labeled "immigrants" not "expats", on basis of their ethnicity, and not on personal education. To go back to the point of the Guardian piece, how is the term "expat" useful? Why not "call them immigrants like everyone else"? I am an American living in Sweden, and I do not work for a multinational company who brought me here on temporary assignment. Do you consider me an expat or an immigrant? Can you tell without knowing my education level? At what point do I switch from one to the other?

dalke 12y ago

That is the simplest definition of ex-pat, but there are other types of ex-pats. Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway are two of the most famous of the American expat community in inter-war Europe. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202317 I listed a couple examples of modern ex-pat artists. As perhaps an extreme counter-example, take a look at Wikipedia's list of American expats in Cuba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_expatriates_in_Cuba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_expatriates_i... . It includes Assata Shakur, who "escaped from prison in 1979 and has been living in Cuba, in political asylum, since 1984". She did not go there to work for an international company, and she is there for an indefinite amount of time.

gamechangr 12y ago
True - There are always "extreme counter-examples" to every situation and I enjoy people who like to be contrarians for the purpose of pointing out there are other "less simple" or more complicated definitions. It does appear that your post didn't really address my main point, which was that "Education" separates the immigrant from the expat.
- dalke 12y ago
  The article said: > Top African professionals going to work in Europe are not considered expats. They are immigrants. Period. “I work for multinational organisations both in the private and public sectors. And being black or coloured doesn’t gain me the term “expat”. I’m a highly qualified immigrant, as they call me, to be politically correct,” says an African migrant worker. For your statement to be meaningful, what more education does this highly qualified African need to be considered an expat? Do people go around asking for someone's educational level before assigning them the label "expat" or "immigrant"? It's much easier to believe that the main distinction is based on the more overt indicators of 'social class, country of origin and economic status', than education level. For example, the thousands of Iraqi doctors, engineers, and other PhD educated people, who fled Iraq and moved to the US or European countries, are labeled "immigrants" not "expats", on basis of their ethnicity, and not on personal education. To go back to the point of the Guardian piece, how is the term "expat" useful? Why not "call them immigrants like everyone else"? I am an American living in Sweden, and I do not work for a multinational company who brought me here on temporary assignment. Do you consider me an expat or an immigrant? Can you tell without knowing my education level? At what point do I switch from one to the other?